Blogosaurus

Since Bush's policies, like Clinton's, FDR's, Grover Cleveland's, and many other polarizing figures, are nowhere near extreme enough or unusual enough to warrant the incredible hatred and imputations of extreme evil aimed at him--

--yeah, yeah, Patriot Ashcroft whatever, I'll worry that he's Goering Junior when he finally murders as many women and children as that nice Janet Reno lady did; and if you don't like big tax cuts for the rich and deficits well, me neither, but if we're both over 18 this isn't the first time in history we've seen either one--

--the student of sociology has to look at other causes to explain this hysteria (a fair word in view of the signage at yesterday's protests, for instance).

It is, of course, not hard to find, no farther than all the talk about red vs. blue states and so on, not to mention the personas of the two candidates running. What the elites hate about Bush, what the intelligentsia find so personally distasteful about the man, is his middle-Americanness, his bourgeois ordinariness-- his fundamentalist faith, his pickup truck and baseball lifestyle, his Clint Eastwood taciturnity (and regular guy inability to speak the language of therapy, which his predecessor of course understood was the ultimate pickup language), and of course, his heretical belief that objectively, America is better than Taliban Afghanistan. Worst of all, of course, is that Bush is not just some hick, a Falwell or Dobson who grew up in Dogpatch worshiping a Redeemer who would kick city boy butt, but that of course he is the quintessential preppy, third generation politician, one of two Skull & Bonesmen in the race and the one with considerably bluer blood than John Kerry, son of a Polish Jew with adopted Protestant religion and Irish Catholic name.

Like FDR, then, Bush is hated as a traitor to his class-- but where in 1932, FDR was hated for betraying the political philosophy of the New England wealthy, Bush is hated for betraying their lifestyle, for having had the chance to remain urbane and upper crust, and throwing it away for Texas and Jesus. Since even the people who despise him for that recognize that, deep down, doing so is kind of shallow-- nothing shows lack of breeding more than openly judging people by their class-- they have to find more serious-seeming and self-acceptable reasons to hate him.

Thus we have the extraordinary acts of psychological projection by which the crimes and attributes of Bush's opponents are literally attributed to him. Our self-declared enemy is (or, more likely, was) an Islamic terrorist leader who seeks the establishment of a global Caliphate and the imposition of Taliban-style theocracy, and would use nukes if he had 'em to purify the world. That his dream that the West will submit to hijab-wearing and Islamic dysfunctional behaviors is so nutty (There are some parts of Brooklyn, Osama, that I wouldn't advise even the Jihad to enter) is beside the point; he did a lot of damage demonstrating that he was a tactical idiot for his cause. The very disappearance, and probable death, of this leader, though, makes it easy for people to mentally refashion Bush exactly along his lines-- like Osama, Bush gave up luxury and loose living for a sternly practical and religious life in a dusty, unpleasant desert, therefore they must both be animated by an identical desire to wage war and inflict mass suffering in the name of establishing a final theocracy to the glory of their respective gods.

To rational folks like ourselves, Bush-- the son who inherited his father's business and like so many second generation leaders combines a shrewd set of instincts born of being close to power (and the power-hungry and sycophantic) all his life, with a certain narrowness and lack of intellectual curiosity that is not atypical for those born at third base-- may or may not seem an admirable figure, but it is absurd to put such religio-Napoleonic dreams on his shoulders. It is much more profitable to see his administration in the terms of trendy business books by Tom Peters or Peter Drucker, and to recognize that Bush approaches the world like a CEO facing a marketplace that has changed, with new technologies and foreign competitors:

What do the Honda Supercub, Intel's 8088 processor, and hydraulic excavators have in common?... These products did not come about as the result of successful companies carrying out sound business practices in established markets. In The Innovator's Dilemma, author Clayton M. Christensen shows how these and other products cut into the low end of the marketplace and eventually evolved to displace high-end competitors and their reigning technologies.

That summary of a recent business bestseller describes exactly Bush's way of going around the UN and the traditional (high-end) powers and forming his own coalition of low-end powers from Poland to Australia. Many other such books explain more-- what is Bush if not a One-Minute Manager? What is his contempt for the slow, cautious foreign policy elite and the Kissingerian status quo they want to protect if not the entrepreneur's contempt for the cubicled drones at a hidebound old Fortune 500 company? Donald Rumsfeld's attempts to reshape a drastically smaller military for new challenges could hardly be more obviously corporate in inspiration.

But even faced with an administration full of CEOs, even as the name Halliburton is routinely dropped as all the evidence anyone needs for the most outrageous claims, no one recognizes CEO-like behavior when it's right in front of them. The commentariat doesn't read business books, so they've missed the most obvious key to Bush's behavior-- and invent one out of another fact (his religiosity) they are more aware of, if hardly any more comprehending of.